The Hill

Multiple people were shot and killed Sunday, when gunmen opened fire on worshipers at a Quebec City mosque, the Montreal Gazette reports.

Despite attacking a mosque, the attackers appear to be muslims.

CBC News

"It seemed to me that they had a Québécois accent. They started to fire, and as they shot, they yelled, 'Allahu akbar!' The bullets hit people that were praying. People who were praying lost their lives. A bullet passed right over my head.

CBC News appears to have updated their article to remove the names of the arrested. But with one of the people arrested named Mohamed Khadir and the attacker yelling "Allahu Akbar", the Islamic battle cry, the conclusion that it is another jihadi attack is inescapable.

UPDATE: Turns out Mohamed may not have been the shooter. No explanation for why Alexandre Bissonnette, who the police have charged with 6 counts of murder, would have shouted Allahu Akbar. But maybe one of the victims was shouting that in a plea for aid or something?

The Hill

At least four senior officials in President Trump’s White House have active accounts on a private Republican National Committee (RNC) email system, according to a new report.

Oh my god! Trump and his advisors have private email addresses! The horror!

This is obviously intended to imply to the reader a connection with Hillary's private email server, and smear Trump by association with it. It's a false comparison, as only a little thought will reveal quite clearly.

The problem with Hillary's private email server was not that it existed, that she and her advisors had accounts on it, or that they used those accounts. The problem was that Hillary and her advisors used those accounts (in Hillary's case exclusively) for official government business, and broke a variety of laws in doing so. The laws Hillary broke were:

1) You are not allowed to use non-secure systems for handling classified information. Hillary did this a lot.

2) You are not allowed to withhold records of your official business from the public (via FOIA) and the national archives. Hillary initially sought to avoid both, until the existence of her private email server was revealed in the Benghazi investigation and the lack of responsive records from other sources demonstrated she was using it exclusively for official business.

Many officials in the Obama administration had private email accounts. Most of them did not use those accounts for official business often (and characterized the cases where they did as exceptions). This is reasonable and normal, so long as the official email accounts are used for the vast majority of government work.

It's worth noting that government officials are probably required by law to use non-government email addresses for political purposes, meaning of course Trump and his political advisors have and use private email addresses.

So long as they aren't conducting government business that should be archived and available via FOIA through those addresses, it's all good.

The Hill

Trump’s shortlist for the nation’s highest court reportedly includes Hardiman, federal Judge William Pryor of Alabama and federal Judge Neil Gorsuch of Colorado.

I've mentioned Neil Gorsuch before. Thomas Hardiman appears to be positive on 2nd Amendment issues as well. I'm posting the USA Today short-profiles of each of the three judges on the short list below the fold along with my preliminary thoughts. At this stage I'm not comfortable giving anyone my seal of approval. It's noteworthy that Reason argues against Pryor on the grounds that he is too deferential to government.

It's worth reading if you don't have the book. The bottom line on voter fraud is that it's a real problem that corrupt politicians would much rather we didn't look at closely. It's rapidly becoming clear that whatever Trump is, he's not a corrupt politician. Even his own party and his own lawyers are warning him off the voter fraud topic, but he seems inclined to continue anyway.

Personally, I think voter fraud is widespread. I'm not sure it's widespread enough to reverse the popular vote results. Let's do some math.

The "consensus figure" on illegal immigrants appears to be about 12 million. I think that's low, but let's go with it.

In 2016, turnout was about 55%. That's 6 million potential votes. Assuming half of them voted for Hillary, that's 3 million potential Hillary votes right there -- her entire popular vote margin.

There have been a couple reports of various Trump advisors being registered to vote in more than one state. Usually those reports are contrasted with Trump's claims that voter fraud is a significant problem and should be investigated, as if there is some contradiction between the two things.

There may in fact be a connection, but it's not a contradiction. States currently don't coordinate about their voter registration lists much. Properly, they should clean their lists before each election, so that someone registered in two states has their older registration removed, and illegal aliens or felons are also removed from the list. There's not really any way that I know of for someone who is moving from one state to another to notify the state they are leaving to remove their voter registration.

Thus people inevitably end up on registration lists in multiple states, at least until the states clean their lists. Lately, states haven't been doing that, in no small part because the Justice Department under Obama has not been enforcing that part of the federal laws on voting.

And now that's being abused to embarrass Trump advisors and officials as if it was their fault. If they had voted in two places, it would be. But being registered in two places just means you've moved out of state since Obama was elected president.

So thanks, media, for making investigative journalism great again. Now let's get right on fixing the flaws in the voter registration system your investigation turned up, shall we?

Miami abandons sanctuary city policy.

Trump has not yet been in office a full week.

Washington Free Beacon

“At EPA headquarters, the mood remains dark,” ProPublica reported Wednesday. “A longtime career communications employee said in a phone interview Tuesday that more than a few friends were ‘coming to work in tears’ each morning as they grappled with balancing the practical need to keep their jobs with their concerns for the issues they work on.”

I suggest that employees of the Environmental Protection Agency who are so partisan that the election of a moderate Republican like Trump reduces them to tears should resign immediately and find work more in line with their need for an emotionally stable environment.

They can think of it as protecting their personal environment.

And the rest of us will thank them for getting out of our way.

... in the course of a general review of all funding for international treaties aimed at a 40% decrease. Good. We have a huge debt and deficit problem. We're paying other countries to loan us money and regulate our industry to death. That's absurd.

To the extent we have foreign aid programs on a solid quid-pro-quo basis, I'm fine with them. If we want an airbase in Turkey, we should probably be prepared to pay for it. But that's a tiny fraction of the foreign aid we pay to places like the UN, and after 8 years of Obama, we need to review every cent.

Oh, and by happy coincidence, Trump appears to have frozen Obama's last-minute $221 million terrorist payoff. Note that Obama already paid them $250 million in 2016 alone, not including the $221 million that Trump froze. Let's stop paying terrorists.

No, they were not organized in spontaneous protest to Trump. They were organized to kick off Hillary Clinton's agenda as president, and intended to celebrate her inauguration. But then she did the unthinkable and lost. The left didn't want to waste so much of George Soros's money, so they repurposed the march.

I think the march was a mistake. As a celebration of Hillary's election, it could have worked. As a protest against Trump... well, women in modern industrial societies are simply not oppressed. Equal rights, equal pay for equal work, access to health care, no need to wear a "modesty garment" or be subject to the whims of your male relatives, the list goes on and on. Give women what they want, it seems, and they'll wear pussy hats and scream at you anyway.

Or just kidnap you, hold you for ransom, torture you and kill you.

Washington Post

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

Trump has just invented the self-draining swamp.
For his next trick, he will invent the self-deporting illegal alien.

Some people in the press are saying these simultaneous resignations are a big deal. Others are saying it's just Trump accepting their resignations in order to replace them with his own appointees. I learn towards the second option, but the way the stories were pushed in the media, it was supposed to be a big deal according to whoever leaked it.

Obviously the intent of the news accounts was to embarrass the Trump administration and make things appear to be more difficult for him. But Trump and his pick for Secretary of State doesn't seem to have any issues with selecting the right people for the job and putting them in place.

In effect, these resignations are just cleaning out the positions for new people Trump can promote and make his own. That's true whether it was Trump accepting offered resignations or State Department officials trying to make a political statement on the way out the door. Either way, today is full of win.

NRA-ILA

The National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) today scored a victory when Congress agreed to review, and likely revoke, a final rule by the Obama administration that would blindly strip law-abiding Americans of their Second Amendment rights.

Last year, the Social Security Administration finalized a proposed rule to ban certain recipients who use a representative payee from owning firearms. This ill-conceived action affected the most vulnerable in America and stripped them of their right to keep and bear arms without due process.

If Congress reviews and revokes this rule, it will be an important victory -- but it will also represent an expenditure of political capital that we need to try to advance gun rights while we have the narrow opportunity to do so.

Nevertheless, it must be done. And frankly, the Obama Administration's targeting of elderly social security recipients for this sort of backdoor gun prohibition is despicable. These are people at the end of their lives, who probably just want to pass their property -- including firearms -- down to their children while being left to live out their lives in peace and as much health as they have remaining. They are among our nation's most vulnerable, and they don't have a lot of disposable income to pay lawyers.

There's a similar issue at the Veteran's Administration that I've reported on before. Hopefully both rules will get reviewed and revoked.

LA Times

Federal agents are reinvestigating the backgrounds of dozens of Syrian refugees already in the United States after discovering a lapse in vetting that allowed some who had potentially negative information in their files to enter the country, two U.S. law enforcement officials said.

Agents have not concluded that any of the refugees should have been rejected for entry, but the apparent glitch — which was discovered in late 2015 and corrected last year — prevented U.S. officials who conducted background checks on the refugees from learning about possible “derogatory” information about them, the two officials said. At a minimum, the intelligence would have triggered further investigation that could have led some asylum applications to be rejected.

Yes, Trump has frozen the refugee program. That's good. But it turns out that the refugees previously admitted under Obama were not quite as thoroughly vetted as they could have been.

Daily Caller

Days into Donald Trump’s administration, heads are finally beginning to roll at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Two notoriously corrupt employees in Puerto Rico were fired this week, indicating that more may be on the way.

This seems like a positive step, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is litigation (just because the civil service protections are strong enough to invite it). Still, they can litigate from the outside.

Now let's see Trump fire IRS Commissioner Koskinen.

PJMedia

This high-profile ecumenical event illustrates starkly the conundrum of mainstream Islamic practice within our free, multi-confessional, but overwhelmingly non-Muslim society. Pious Muslims repeat the Fatiha, including verse 7, up to 17 times per day during their five requisite prayer sessions, and the accompanying “subunits” of prayer (see pp.49-50). While verses 1-6 are confined to Muslims re-affirming their personal devotion to the Islamic creed, and its deity, Allah, verse 7 launches into open condemnation of other faiths -- specifically Judaism and Christianity.

This is a problem. Mind you, I don't blame Trump for this; I doubt he knew and I doubt the recitation was in English. Instead, it illustrates for me the vicious denigration of other faiths that is built into the core of Islam, along with the deception necessary to espouse it at a interfaith event. Between the demand for sharia law, the refusal to acknowledge nations which have a legal separation between church and state, the doctrine of conversion by the sword, and the general embrace of violence, Islam is not compatible with modern nations and freedom of conscience.

Dallas News

On Wednesday morning, the new president announced on Twitter that he will launch a "major investigation into VOTER FRAUD" — backing up a debunked and widely derided claim that he's repeated privately on Monday in a meeting with congressional leaders.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer had sought to downplay the president's persistent belief, in the absence of any evidence, that fraud on a massive, scandalous scale had allowed Democrat Hillary Clinton to scoop up more votes than he did.

I can't speak for how many fraudulent votes were counted for Hillary due to machine politics, illegal aliens and felons voting, illegal "voter assistance" of the elderly and mentally handicapped, not to mention ballots found in boxes and closets and trunks of cars or wirelessly hacked into existence by corrupt electronic voting machines or cast by people who have been dead for years. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the number is not zero.

I welcome a major investigation into organized vote fraud activity by the Democratic party and its candidates, affiliates, operatives, PACs, NGOs, and activists. Let's shine some light on this and watch the cockroaches scurry.

Finally, some economic growth. He will also hold the Environmental Protection Agency responsible for failing to protect the environment from themselves.

The Hill

President Trump stands by his belief that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday.

The spokesman doubled down on the false claim after the president raised it Monday night during a reception with congressional leaders.

Here's the thing: without voter ID laws in place we have no way to know this isn't happening. Even the people who claim to debunk this number have to focus on the number itself; they point to small numbers of prosecutions and convictions while ignoring that fact that without voter id laws and proof of citizenship requirements (which almost no states have in place) you have no way to prove that all 30+ million illegal aliens aren't voting. You simply have no idea.

Some people are discussing Neil Gorsuch as Trump's first Supreme Court nominee. Based on the profile I linked above, he seems a good choice.

DallasNews

President Donald Trump will order the construction of a Mexican border wall on Wednesday, White House officials said, and is mulling plans to stop Syrian refugees from entering the country and to slash immigration of refugees from "terror prone" nations, perhaps as early as this week.

During an appearance at the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday, Trump plans to sign an executive order to direct federal funds to be shifted toward the building of a wall on the southern border that became a signature promise of his campaign. He has argued that doing so is vital to gaining control over the illegal flow of immigrants into the United States.

I'm not sure where he's finding the money to build this wall, but presumably he's doing what Obama has done many times before -- using funds Congress has authorized that lacked very specific strings on how they were spent.

Remember, the wall itself has been authorized by Congress for over a decade now. The holdup has been Congressional authorization for specific funds. All it takes is a President willing to redirect funds from general programs.

Freezing the "refugee" program is also wise.

CNS News

President Barack Obama had an average approval rating of 47.9 percent during his time in office, according to the Gallup poll.

That puts him behind Richard Nixon, who resigned, and George W. Bush, who saw his approval rating drop as low as 25 percent near the end of his term.

That makes all the media blather about Obama's high approval ratings to be just more fake news.

The only place Obama enjoyed consistently high approval ratings was among the media who reported on him.

Dallas News

Spirited demonstrations unfolded peacefully at various security checkpoints near the Capitol as police helped ticket-holders get through to the inaugural ceremony. Signs read, "Resist Trump Climate Justice Now," ''Let Freedom Ring," ''Free Palestine."

But at one point, police gave chase to a group of about 100 protesters who smashed the windows of downtown businesses as they denounced capitalism and Trump. Police in riot gear used pepper spray from large canisters and eventually cordoned off the protesters, who shouted, "Hands up, don't shoot," as a helicopter hovered overhead.

They also attacked and burned a limo with the driver inside (at least at first; he got out with minor injuries).

And they get a bonus whitewashing of Communism:

Dallas News

Along the parade route, the ANSWER Coalition anti-war group planned demonstrations at two locations.

ANSWER is a communist organization. Literally communist. The anti-war thing is their effort at a friendlier public face since people don't like communism nearly as much after they found out about the body count.

No Lawyers

Yesterday was the last full day of the Obama Administration. It did not pass without a last parting shot by the anti-hunting, anti-shooting so-called environmentalists. US Fish and Wildlife Director Dan Ashe issued a Director's Order that will ban the use of traditional, lead-based ammunition on Federal lands within five years. Thus it gives groups like the Center for Biological Diversity and Project Gutpile a win that they could not achieve in the courts.

Hopefully this gets added to the pile of things Trump needs to reverse immediately.

The 7th Circuit has ruled in Ezell II that Chicago can't use a patchwork of laws and regulations to effectively ban shooting ranges. The author of the opinion is on Trump's Supreme Court shortlist, Diane Sykes.

... and, knock on wood, a peaceful transition of power despite the best efforts of the left. I welcome, with caution, the Trump administration. He's going to have a lot of work to do undoing the damage Obama has done, and hopefully can find the time to make some headway on restoring our nation to freedom and liberty. He has a lot of "yuge" campaign promises to keep, and he's off to a great start.

Clearly this judge got tired of being played for a fool. He's ordered 4 Homeland Security officials to copy their private emails to a USB thumb drive in case they turn out not to be private. That won't stop them declining to turn over thing they really want to hide, but it does make it a lot harder for them to explain "accidentally" leaving out anything embarrassing.